02-05-2008, 01:15 AM
Good for you :]
May I suggest learning to use textures, inner-glows, drop shadows and borders in photoshop, as well as some very faint bevels. Also learning to work with rasterized layers is crucial as it allows you to flatten a pre-textured shape then cut pieces out of it, whitest it maintains its effects.
Don't settle for the photoshop defaults on any of them, you always want to set the drop shadow offset to 0, if you have larger than a 1px border you want to set the shadow density to 13 to maintain the effect.
Inner glows are very 2000 - 2004 ish as thats when they started getting widely used, they now look dated and ugly but applied very, very faintly in white over certain shapes can have a really nice effect.
Bevels, you want about 2px' on shapes with the darkness and lightness turned down to about 30%. Throw some effects on a square, right click the layer, rasterize it, then cut it up using the cut/paste tool thingie - you'll quickly learn how rasterizing layers is a huge advantage when creating a GUI.
To cut a rounded/none square shape out of a rasterized layer, draw said shape on a layer above, rasterize it, select it with the cut/paste tool then nudge it with a key, you will see the shapes outline is now selected perfectly. Go back to your original layer, press the delete key. vualla. Also, something thats v.handy to know is on the file menu, you have Selection > Invert selection, that is epic win in certain circumstances.
Some handy tips, grab hold of photoshop CS3 - its leetness in an app.
May I suggest learning to use textures, inner-glows, drop shadows and borders in photoshop, as well as some very faint bevels. Also learning to work with rasterized layers is crucial as it allows you to flatten a pre-textured shape then cut pieces out of it, whitest it maintains its effects.
Don't settle for the photoshop defaults on any of them, you always want to set the drop shadow offset to 0, if you have larger than a 1px border you want to set the shadow density to 13 to maintain the effect.
Inner glows are very 2000 - 2004 ish as thats when they started getting widely used, they now look dated and ugly but applied very, very faintly in white over certain shapes can have a really nice effect.
Bevels, you want about 2px' on shapes with the darkness and lightness turned down to about 30%. Throw some effects on a square, right click the layer, rasterize it, then cut it up using the cut/paste tool thingie - you'll quickly learn how rasterizing layers is a huge advantage when creating a GUI.
To cut a rounded/none square shape out of a rasterized layer, draw said shape on a layer above, rasterize it, select it with the cut/paste tool then nudge it with a key, you will see the shapes outline is now selected perfectly. Go back to your original layer, press the delete key. vualla. Also, something thats v.handy to know is on the file menu, you have Selection > Invert selection, that is epic win in certain circumstances.
Some handy tips, grab hold of photoshop CS3 - its leetness in an app.